An Experiential Learning Approach: Empowering Women Entrepreneurs in Umm Qais, Jordan
Challenges
In Umm Qais, women entrepreneurs live in an area with limited physical and digital infrastructure, weak access to markets, and a high dependence on fluctuating tourist flows, which makes their income highly unstable and their businesses vulnerable to external shocks.
Additionally, many female business owners and entrepreneurs lack the required government permits and operate informally, which further restricts access to finance, support programmes, and institutional protection, reinforcing their marginal position in the tourism value chain.
Home-based female entrepreneurs are women who operate small-scale tourism-related micro-businesses from their residences, such as homestays, artisanal craft production, farm-to-table catering, or cultural experience hosting.
Harb et al. (2025) have identified a series of competencies that require additional capacity-building amongst home-based female entrepreneurs and examine the use of experiential learning techniques in Umm Qais. Those competencies identified include communication skills, entrepreneurship and business growth, financial management, and quality management.
These gaps are critical in a post‑pandemic context in which tourists increasingly discover, evaluate, and book services online, and where digital presence can make the difference between visibility and invisibility.
Results
To respond to these challenges in a way that is both practical and sensitive to local realities, researchers have designed an experiential learning model tailored specifically to home-based female tourism entrepreneurs in Umm Qais. All the women involved in the study expressed a preference for an experiential learning approach that allows them to actively engage with real-life situations.
In this regard, one woman stated, “I have been in many workshops, but I am looking for a new experience where I can see things in the real world”. Therefore, rather than relying solely on classroom lectures, the learning approach integrated three complementary components: structured theory sessions, project visits to participants’ own home-based ventures, and field trips to external tourism and hospitality businesses and institutions.
Project visits brought the learning directly into each woman’s home and tourism business, making the training highly contextualized and concrete. Women had the opportunity to showcase their work, such as cooking for the group or displaying crafts, and then receive constructive feedback on layout, storytelling, customer flow, and promotion.
Additionally, the visits also created a safe space for peer-to-peer learning; participants could see how others organized their space, managed time, or interacted with customers, and they often spontaneously shared tips, techniques, and ideas.
Field trips extended the experiential dimension beyond the immediate community to more established tourism and hospitality businesses, such as hotels, restaurants, and attractions, as well as to support institutions like incubators or training centers.
Throughout the entire process, peer interaction, group discussion, and shared reflection were deliberately encouraged so that women could relate what they saw and learned to their own projects, identify complementarities between their businesses, and begin to form a local network of mutual support.
Lessons Learned
The case shows that an experiential and gender-responsive learning model, blending theory with project visits and field trips, helped women better grasp and apply concepts like quality, customer service, and financial management by grounding them in real-life practice. It also revealed that peer learning, safe spaces for interaction, and network-building among women-led microenterprises were central to empowerment.
The process strengthened tourism business and social networks, fostering collaboration through joint offerings, referrals, and coordinated activities, while nurturing a sense of solidarity and mutual support.
Finally, the case underscored that although digital skills were initially very limited, targeted, inclusive, and need-based digital capacity building holds strong potential to expand market reach, build resilience, and link rural home-based businesses to an expanding online tourism marketplace.
The Umm Qais experience thus shows that experiential, context-specific, and market-oriented training can be a powerful entry point for women’s empowerment. Its long-term impact, however, depends on embedding such learning models into local support systems rather than relying on one-off interventions.
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